The present disclosure is related to methods of fabricating sand control screen assemblies used in the oil and gas industry and, more particularly, to using three-dimensional printing techniques to fabricate sand control screen assemblies and their associated apparatus.
In the course of completing an oil and/or gas well, it is common practice to run a string of protective casing into the wellbore and then to run a production tubing inside the casing. At the well site, the casing is perforated across one or more production zones to allow production fluids to enter the interior of the casing. In some completions, the well bore is uncased, and an open face is established across the production zones. During production of fluids derived from the production zones, formation sand and other solid particulates are also often swept into the flow path and into the casing. The formation sand is relatively fine sand that can erode production components in the flow path.
To prevent or mitigate the production of formation sand and other solid particulates during production operations, one or more sand screens are commonly installed in the flow path between the production tubing and the perforated casing (cased) or the open wellbore face (uncased). The sand screens and their various components are used as a filter medium designed to allow fluids derived from the formation to flow therethrough but substantially prevent the influx of particulate matter of a predetermined size.
One type of sand screen is a slotted liner made by cutting multiple slots of a predetermined gauge into base pipe. Fluids are able to pass into the base pipe via the slots, while particulates larger than the predetermined gauge are substantially prevented from traversing the slots. Another type of sand screen is a wire-wrapped screen, which consists of an outer jacket including a shaped wire that is simultaneously wrapped and welded to longitudinal rods or ribs that extend along the outer surface of a perforated base pipe. The wire is wrapped about the base pipe multiple times to provide predetermined gap or gauge between adjacent turns and then welded at each end to the production tubing. Fluids passing through the wire wrap are able to enter the production tubing through one or more flow ports defined in the production tubing below the screen jacket.
Another type of sand screen is a sintered metal screen, which consists of placing a sintered metal sleeve over a perforated base pipe. The filter medium for the sintered metal screen is a sintered metal powder that is pressed against a stainless steel lattice screen to provide structural support for the filtration medium. The sintered metal sleeve contains a predetermined flow area and acts as the filtration medium, while the base pipe provides tensile strength and collapse resistance. Yet another type of sand screen is a porous metal membrane screen, which consists of multiple layers (3 or 4) of porous metal membrane (PMM) positioned between an underlying drainage and overlying protecting mesh screen. Each PMM provides a predetermined percentage of open area through variable-sized pore openings and they are each placed concentrically between a perforated base pipe and a perforated outer shroud.
Fabricating the aforementioned sand screens can be a time-consuming and intricate process that requires a great deal of precision to ensure that proper sizes, geometry, and flow gauges are met.